Back when rock was soft and restricted to a teenage audience who fed dimes into bottomless jukeboxes, and there was an innocence in the music that adults didn’t hear, a song came out. Just one among many, it was a love song, but had a definite tone of something disturbing beneath.
As it was innocent, not many people caught it. The song was well done, easy to listen to, and writers Sid Wayne and Sherman Edwards deliberately aimed it at the teen demographic. Something today creeps people out about adults writing songs for and about teens, which shows how much we’ve not only lost our own memories of innocence but stolen it from next generations. It’s been progressive, this loss, this crime of the arts. We are diminished by its spread of restrictions, stigma, and so much worse. In 1966, a second version of the song was cut by the group The Happenings. It charted higher than the ’59 version, and I heard my older sister play it all the time. I loved it. I understood it and heard it with an innocence even as my innocence was being stripped from me by sexual abuse and vicious beatings. It was the beginning of a time in which I was malformed into a cynic and a romantic, quite a strange and perverse thing for one so young.
The song is about a male teen telling his girlfriend to have a good summer, and that he hopes to see her in September when school starts. What could possibly be more innocent and romantic, right?
But the boy isn’t feeling very secure about their relationship; what really comes across is,
Have a good time,
But remember,
There is danger
In the summer moon above
Will I see you in September,
Or lose you to a summer love?
It’s heart-rending, his terrible fear. Many teens found it fit their tastes for romance and the fear of losing it; how the pangs of love were both happy and sweet but tinged with bittersweet insecurities. Which was perfectly normal.
Meanwhile, conservatives and the Christians among them condemned rock and roll in every form. Television censors were heavy-handed with variety shows like Ed Sullivan’s and niche programs like American Bandstand. And we are still paying for it.
REPRESSION SQUARED
Keep in mind: I’m a Christian, so when I get critical of other “Christians” I’m not gonna be very nice about it because, in the end, I’m still an asshole and I hate fakes and fanatics. Groups of repressive Christians have always existed since the beginning when the churches began to spread. People didn’t have Gospels and the bible, and bound books didn’t exist. The Apostles wrote letters and told the story of Christ by word of mouth. And some got carried away. And once that starts, it can’t be undone or stopped. Inertia by proxy drives it. Mania, hysteria and bigotry enter the message of love and forgiveness. Through the centuries it got worse and this is undisputed history. Bloody crusades and inquisitions. Reformations, councils and the split into so many denominations that require different interpretations of a simple doctrine that, guess what? The prediction made by Jesus himself came true and is now so bad that people are fleeing the church.
It’s called “apostasy”, and it refers directly to a church preaching and embracing false teachings, or doctrine. And it is everywhere, and thanks to the internet, it will only get worse.
You may not have been around in the 60s, but what happened, in shorthand, is that the teens and young adults whose biggest worries should have been graduating from college and high school, buying a car or a house or which albums to spend their allowance on, were thrust together into a fight they had no business being involved in and yet, it was forced upon them. And they were willing and able to rise up and fight for their beliefs and their rights.
The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement gave them an awful burden. They could stand up or be silent. And that’s no choice for young people. Those who remained silent were always the majority. It was the news that made it appear otherwise. The media was covering the war and the protests against it. The protesters were deliberately put in a horrible light; film editing made it worse. Those who stood up were called names, the most tame of which was “hippies”, and they were arrested, attacked by police with tear gas and fire hoses and riot sticks.
Girls of every teen year above 16 stopped getting letters from boyfriends who were never coming back, unless it was in a body bag. His parents told the girlfriends, often with tragic results. Oh, songs were written about them, too. Got censored; the president and his DoD fought antiwar “propaganda” and counterculture with a behind the scenes ruthlessness that took the media off balance.
Pop and folk singers and songwriters quickly took to using vague lyrics and symbolism to keep conservative watchdogs off their backs. But attrition always has a price. Some families – wives, parents, siblings – and girlfriends and fiancees – who were neutral about the war – became powerful antagonists and even leaders fighting to end the conflict. People grew angry and weary of the “Missing In Action”, “Killed In Action”, POW or other news, whether it was within their family or that of a friend, most often delivered by way of some Western Union telegram, a true slap in the face. The casualties mounted. And the antiwar movement became a force all its own.
Of course, it wasn’t so simple. It was a sort of war on American soil, with a strange mix of people from all religions, all political ideologies, all economic groups against the government of the United States. That just made the Johnson and Nixon administrations grow defensive. Nixon ran on a promise to end the war. Once in the Oval Office, he ordered portions of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia carpet bombed by B-52 heavy bombers. Physical incursion into the latter two by infantry and mechanized cavalry with infantry support upped the casualties and resulted in the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot consolidating power, winning the civil war Nixon had tried disastrously to end in favor of the right-wing factions, and eventually the deaths of unknown numbers of Cambodian civilians. Estimates after the one million mark are unreliable. We know it was probably more but those numbers were subject to the government playing with numbers. At home, it was not widely known when the bombing began. Washington…grew more aggressive.
Repressive government behaviour and policies are the very birth of rebellion. The whole thing got worse when churches and Christian associations tried to counter the sexual revolution, the antiwar movement and the Civil Rights movement. When women organized for their own rights and burned bras, it seemed the whole country was doomed. Many “Christian” pastors and writers screamed about the coming Judgement. The stereotypical unkempt man wearing a sandwich board with the word “Repent” became fodder for comedy shows.
You should be able to take it from here. Either you or your parents know what comes next.
The evolution of the conservatives and Christian fanatics has been, to atheists and others, horrifying. To genuine and imperfect people of faith, it became a matter of breaking out in cold sweats. They thought that if the prophecies were right, the end could truly be near. Because how do you fight evil and apostasy that powerful? Pat Robertson wasn’t even close to the first who used Jesus as a reason to advocate killing, even murder. The Westboro Baptist Church wasn’t the first to protest the LGBTQ community, and wasn’t the last. The price our country has paid…continues to pay…for recklessly trying to control the lives and behaviour of people whose rights have been routinely violated…is too high. How much innocent blood has been shed in executions? War? Ethnic hatred (recent reports of deplorable conditions inside “camps” for migrant children prove that the government is guilty of ethnic-based crimes against humanity)? How many people have known pain and been traumatized by people in power who don’t like who other people love, who they worship, their skin color or their political affiliations and ideology?
How many gay and lesbian and trans people have been murdered in the streets?
CAN IT HAPPEN AGAIN?
I think you know this question. Many have asked it since 2015.
They look back on history. The Holocaust. They’re scared it could happen again. We said “never again” in the sad but heady relief and joy after VE Day. Hitler was dead. In one of the final battles of that theatre of the Second World War, soldiers of the Wehrmacht actually fought with allies – on the same side. Weird times, to be sure. But months prior, as allied units found and entered labor and death camps, they saw things that no part of the war so far could have prepared them for. The stench hit them before they got close if the wind was just right. And no matter what the wind was doing, the smell of dirty and dead bodies was on them before they could enter the compound, usually after the Germans who ran it had fled.
A rank odor that they would never be able to forget. And what met their eyes was so horrific that the strongest among them cried, retched and seethed with a thirst for revenge. So many were in shock, their senses overloaded with horror and sorrow that for the rest of their lives they never talked about it. The nightmares never ended. A different kind of nightmare than the ones where they were in foxholes being shelled by Nazi mortars or 88 millimeter guns. Different from the D-Day and the Ardennes nightmares.
It is a myth that America was the country doing most of the fighting in Europe; that was always England. It was mostly our supplies and machines they needed. In the end, it didn’t matter. They were all men who had seen too much, done too much and suffered too much. Women who worked as radar operators, mechanics, plant production workers and nurses, the latter dangerously close to the fighting, all suffered their own trauma.
In France it was reported that more French women were raped by American soldiers during the war than by Nazis. That war unhinged the whole world.
At the time, it was little known by the public that Stalin had long been murdering his own people and despite needing every man to fight the Germans, kept doing it. For certain, Roosevelt and Truman, Churchill and their top commanders knew. They never trusted Uncle Joe, but the immediate concerns were the Nazis and Imperial Japan. So they pinched Berlin between them and wreaked utter destruction on the Third Reich. The Soviets got to Berlin first. They unleashed all their national anger in every part of the city. Many soldiers, officers and civilians tried to flee Berlin to the west and the safety of the British and American military. Those who did not make it paid dearly for the sins of Adolph Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Walther Funk, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Karl Donitz, Erich Raeder, Wilhelm Keitel, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Hermann Göring, and many others. House to house, Soviets used grenade launchers, artillery, tanks and machine guns to kill everyone who was left. Women found alive including female juveniles were repeatedly raped and then murdered. The darkest hours of human history were on all of Europe like a smothering blanket.
The men Hitler surrounded himself with were ruthless and efficient. These men lacked something essential to qualify as human beings, and by the boxcar, undesirable people by Reich standards arrived at concentration camps, never again to know freedom or a moment’s peace. Through bitter cold, infested with lice and sick with dysentery and worse afflictions, they died by the numbers. Most were executed by gassing with truck exhaust or Zyclon B, many were shot with MP 40 submachine guns or MG-42s. Some were just allowed to freeze. Others starved. Some were placed in ovens and cremated alive.
And it wasn’t just European Jews who were marked for these horrible deaths. Homosexuals, Christians, blacks, the handicapped and German political dissidents were all shipped to these places.
As the world saw the footage captured on film, outrage grew. The war crimes trials against both Germany and Japan brought the extent of the atrocities to the public. And we said, “Never again”.
And now, Donald Trump has made it possible. From Hispanic refugees including children who can’t be accounted for to adults imprisoned in my own county all the way up here in Maryland, we are sitting still while nobody says a bloody thing, and the initial protests have either stopped or have ceased to be of interest to the media.
Yes. It can happen again. It is happening, right now. Considering how we’ve been distracted by the Mueller investigation, Iran and China, the government is able to numb us and do whatever it wants, and we will not notice it.
My young days of innocence are more than a half century in the past. But I still remember it. The songs. The way people said “please” and “thank you” and school books had expressions like “see Spot run”. When I could play with a cap gun and no one thought of calling the police.
The Cold War was scary. But even though carried to the brink at times, reason prevailed. There were cowboy hats and cap pistols and rock and roll and malt Shoppes. And innocence. We live now in a time of unreasonablness and a refusal of leaders to face reality.
“DEATH TO SINNERS!”
Young people are indifferent to the future they face, from a hellish result of climate change within their lifetimes to the lost forever concept of innocence and wonder of the coolest things the planet, and what life, offers them. Gangs and school shootings and street drugs have taken the place of the beauty of learning and discovery. Sex begins with texts on phones, where the thrill of getting to know someone is robbed by giving and getting too much information, and nothing is taboo, nothing is worthy of keeping secret or within certain boundaries; all gratification is instant or quickly abandoned for something else. And so we come full circle, back to the repressive Christians of the far right, who seek to stomp out not merely sin, but sinners as well.
Recently a pastor at a Tennessee church tried to have a meeting at a local Cracker Barrel. They were refused entry. The reason: the pastor is calling for LGBTQ people to be murdered. That’s right. Killed in cold blood. All of them. There’s something really wrong with this guy, but using the Bible to justify killing anyone is as evil as you can get. Not that it’s the first time, but this movement is getting some real attention. Any real Christian should know that murder wouldn’t please Jesus, who stopped the stoning of a woman accused of adultery by an angry mob.
We need more people to stand up to twisted fakes, to get their shit together and protest en masse against imprisoned children, to fight climate change, injustices and corruption of all kinds in our government. But this is not the 60s and 70s. The young cannot be prevailed upon to even save themselves. They’re everywhere you look, alone or in groups, and not one of them isn’t bent at the neck over a cell phone. The creepiest thing is, a large group of kids can be sitting around. They know each other. There’s no one talking. No couples kissing. They’re all texting.
Studies are critical of this; one discovery is that people of all ages are growing “horn-like” bone spurs from looking down as they text and read…the largest group is the youngest. They cannot fight back against anything except a parent taking away their phones.
The innocence is gone. Perhaps at a point there was some benefit. The war in Vietnam was ended because not only was it unwinnable even with carpet-bombing, but because America hated it and rebelled. But it would be one thing if we still protested in numbers like way back then. Now it’s been left to Cracker Barrel to make a stand against hatred and religious fanaticism.
It’s summer vacation time. No one will listen to old songs and feel scared of losing a love because of the summer moon. There’s a different kind of danger now. There’s a lot of them. Doesn’t anyone care?
Memoirs of an American Asshole 